David Davis after the second round of Brexit talks in Brussels on Thursday.
Photograph: François Lenoir/Reuters

The centenary year of the Russian revolutions of 2017 highlights an accidentally topical question: what do revolutionaries do when they actually get their revolution? The immediate aftermath of the Bolshevik takeover of October 1917, wrote Leon Trotsky, often boiled down to “legislative improvisation”. In his autobiography, My Life, he explained the general idea as follows: “Everything had to proceed from the beginning. There were no ‘precedents’, since history had none to offer … As a rule, matters were brought up for consideration without previous preparation, and almost always as urgent business.”

Does this remind you of anything? Swap St Petersburg at the time of the first world war for a Brussels conference room a century later, and you perhaps get a comparable sense of slightly unhinged ideals colliding with reality (albeit without the rattle of gunfire and the looming prospect of civil war). “The Bolsheviks came to power without a detailed template for the new state order,” wrote the anti-communist historian Robert Service in his 2007 book Comrades. “They did their inventing almost as an afterthought.”

Reading those words again this week, my mind settled on three things: Theresa May’s claim last year that Brexit was nothing less than a “revolution”, that image of David Davis facing the EU’s negotiating teams sans notes, and an essential difference between Bolsheviks and Tory Brexiteers – the fact that whereas the former’s revolutionary project survived its most besieged and confused period, the latter’s seems to be crumpling before it has even got started.

Which brings us to the dire state of the Conservative party. Most political commentary frames mounting Tory chaos in terms of May’s spectacularly ill-advised decision to call a general election, runners and riders for the leadership, and the implicit idea that a change of personnel at the top might make a significant difference. But there is a much deeper story at play, about 2017 as the denouement of a Conservative story that dates back 40 years, and what might turn out to be the most piquant of ironies: that if Brexit marks the Tory right’s apogee of influence, it could also prove to be their moment of eclipse, in which they take even the more enlightened elements of their party down with them.

We all know where leaving the EU sits in the romantic imaginations of such Tories as Davis, Boris Johnson and Liam Fox. They have their differences, but 40 years after the first of the great changes authored by Margaret Thatcher they tend to see Brexit as the ultimate stride into the free-market utopia her followers have always dreamed about, with the added bonus of huge patriotic symbolism. In this vision – of, as Fox puts it, “a low regulation and low taxation environment which is only likely to improve outside the EU” – Brussels is not the liberalising, pro-business force that reality suggests, but an eternal brake on enterprise and initiative that has to be comprehensively left behind.

Very often this is the reasoning behind the “no deal is better than a bad deal” position, and the most out-there Conservative vision of post-Brexit Britain, in which the only way to survive will be as a kind of northern European Singapore, fully in keeping with the ideals of the blessed Margaret.

Prior to the election, even if May’s brand of Toryism was turning out to be a lot less laissez-faire and anti-state than these people would have liked, there may have been some mileage in the idea that enough of the electorate would approve of these visions or meekly put up with them to make such turbo-Thatcherism a goer. After all, after seven years of austerity and state-shrinking, the Conservatives were apparently heading for a landslide. But now? Austerity goes on, but its rationale is in retreat. Signal events, from the Grenfell Tower disaster to this week’s figures showing stalling rises in life expectancy and a big surge in crime, only underline the sense of a governing philosophy hitting the skids. The idea of Britain as some indulged, state-dependent place in dire need of further liberation now looks more like the stuff of political suicide than the basis of any renewal.

And then there are the economic factors. In the wake of the 2008 crash we have seen the slowest recovery in modern history, more sluggish even than the British escape from the depression of the 1930s. Wages continue to lag behind prices; poor pay feeds into the weak demand that seems to rule out any hint of strong growth. Household debt, not surprisingly, is forecast to imminently exceed even the catastrophic levels to which it soared before the crash of 2008. Such, self-evidently, is where the kind of capitalism long embraced and encouraged by British Conservatism has taken us. Rather than what May is like on television, this is the most fundamental reason for the Tories’ recurrently poor showing at national elections. And clearly, the economic convulsions of Brexit will make things much, much worse.

There is – or rather, was – another Conservatism, hostile to grand schemes, accepting of looking to the state for help

What can the Tories do? Well away from the Brexit Bolsheviks, there is a strand of Conservatism that is at least aware of the depth and breadth of these problems. That applies to May herself, though beyond fuzzy talk of a new social contract and the imperative of “government stepping up”, very little flesh has been put on the rhetorical bones. Many of the people who have advocated some kind of Tory reformation are still full-throated Brexiteers, still seemingly oblivious to the basic fact that the society they want and the historic disaster they support are mutually incompatible. But even more problematic is the rising sense that for as long as Conservatism is defined by abstract economic beliefs that increasingly find no reflection in reality (question: which “markets” do Google and Facebook operate in?), and attached to the idea that people have to mostly help themselves, it will founder.

There is – or rather was – another Conservatism, always hostile to grand schemes, accepting of the idea that people can look to the state for help, and well aware that one person’s buccaneering capitalism is often many people’s misery. Sixty years after its postwar peak, it may now be so far-flung as to be beyond the Tories’ reach – though if they lose power to a Jeremy Corbyn-led government, or the current administration quickly finds itself surrounded by the rubble of Brexit, it may once again find its voice. If that happens, the reconstructed Tory view of the party’s recent history will surely centre on one key understanding: that revolutions are largely for zealots and fools, and if Conservatism is the author of uncontrollable chaos, the game is usually up.